“There is no comparison,” concluded Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan, after spending her entire column doing just that, i.e. comparing Antifa, the so-called “alt-left,” with Nazis and white supremacists, the so-called “alt-right.”
When Trump spoke about Charlottesville violence on both sides, Sullivan argued, “He was comparing things that aren’t the least bit equal, neither in scale nor in intent.”
Sullivan trumpeted statistics compiled by the Anti-Defamation League. The U.S. had 372 politically motivated murders between 2007 and 2016, with 74 percent committed by right-wing extremists and only 2 percent by left-wing extremists.*
Yet, those perpetrating 2 percent of such slayings can legitimately be compared to those perpetrating 74 percent — and also likened to thugs who beat down opponents in the street (thankfully without murdering them).
All of the above use violence to achieve political goals.** Some are more deadly than others, but the violent actions of all should be condemned.
Sullivan acknowledged that “it’s safe to say that most news consumers, if they know anything about antifa, know what the president has told them, and what they’ve gleaned from the club-wielding protesters shown endlessly on TV …”
Are citizens not supposed to take note of the violence in living color right before their eyes?
And why are folks uninformed? Could the mainstream media’s failure adequately to cover, say, previous Antifa rioting at Berkeley and elsewhere have something to do with it?
Lastly, Sullivan called on the media “to resist conflating [Antifa] with liberal groups.” Agreed. And let’s have the same fairness in not conflating Nazis and the KKK with conservatives.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* By the process of elimination, “moderate extremists” are apparently committing close to a quarter of all political killings.
** I’ve not drilled down into these stats, or figured out what, precisely, qualifies as “political.”
3 replies on “Alt-Comparisons”
Right & Left Violence: Timeline, by leftist Greg Correll, 10 Jan 2011, claims to compare left and right violence in the US since 1990.
It has many problems:
It lists a load of personal hate crimes. It is unclear that any of these count as political violence. Even if we include them, it is inconsistent:
It assigns all racist attacks by whites to the “right”. But it does not assign all racist attacks by blacks to the “left”. It just omits them.
It assigns all attacks on gays to the “right”. But it does not assign all attacks by Muslims on Jews to the “left”. It just omits them.
It does however include white attacks on Jews, which it assigns to the “right”, despite the left’s strong hatred of Israel and Zionism.
It omits all Islamic “honour killings” in the US. Why? They are the result of an ideology that — if you had to choose — is on the “left”.
It lists inter-racial hate crimes, but it only lists white-on-black crimes, not black-on-white crimes.
Drrik, That’s pretty much what I was planning to comment on. Common sense should tell anyone that these figures look more than a little “made up”. Anyone can make up any figure and if it’s never challenged then people who never check it start believing it. That’s how the world got first global cooling, then global warming, then climate change.
1. The anti-Confederate, anti-KKI, anti-Nazi crowd decries, “Slavery! Racism!”
2. “Racism” is one of the crudest forms of collectivism, i.e., placing the group above the individual.
3. Statist governments like the USSR, Red China, Nazi Germany, etc. preached collectivism, i.e., the subjugation of the individual to the group/the State/the People/Society/the Race/whatever.
4. Most of the anti-Confederate crowd — heck, most Americans — want a bigger government to “keep them safe,” to “provide them X” (health care, retirement, roads, childcare, education, food, phones, etc.) or to “regulate Y” (corporations, drugs, food, capitalism, guns, houses, farming, energy, education, most of the things it “provides,” etc. etc. etc.)
5. A big government imposes taxes, prohibits some behavior, makes other behavior mandatory, abrogates to itself the “right” (in reality, power, even if not yet exercised) to interfere in any and all aspects of life at its discretion.
6. Such a government that controls so much of life and society imposes involuntary servitude, i.e., a “soft” form of slavery, on _all_ its citizens, exhorts the good of “society” or “the many” or “women” or “[insert ethnic group]” or “the elderly” or “[insert racial group]” or any of a plethora of other groups, i.e., collectives, over the rights, the property, the decisions of the individual.
7. The anti-Confederates, etc. (the “Progressives,” the “Left,” Antifa, whatever) thus support a form of collectivism far worse (though more sophisticated) than racism and a form of slavery far more expansive (though less obviously vicious) than anything that occurred in the pre-Antebellum South. (Cf. that Nazis are actually socialists, blood-brothers to communists.)
8. Thus the anti-Confederates are actually attacking groups of people (collectivists) and political ideals (statism) that are identical on a fundamental level with their own group and ideals. They differ only in the particulars of what is targeted by their brand of collectivism and statism.
9. The antidote to racism, collectivism, statism, etc. is _individualism_. Individualism can only survive and prosper in a _free_ society. Liberty is the antithesis of what these groups desire and what the vast majority of Americans truly want, i.e., a bigger government (see above).
10. Enough of these overweening, self-righteous hypocrites who preach the same brand of poison — only in a different bottle — as those they claim to oppose.